Diver Charles Morgan, USS NEW YORK

Describes his Descent into the MAINE

General:

The following account is that related by Charles Morgan, gun captain
on the USS NEW YORK. Morgan was also a trained
diver, who spent about two weeks diving on the wreckage of the MAINE
gathering information for the 1898 Sampson Board which was trying to determine
the cause of the disastrous explosion. The work was exhausting. Normally
the fatigue of a four hour dive was considered a work day for a navy diver.
However, Morgan worked seven hours a day when diving on the MAINE.
Among the divers who worked on the MAINE, Morgan’s
work was notable because he was the first to find the steel plates bent
upward and into the ship, later considered evidence of an external mine.

Diving on the MAINE was a challenge. The
divers, wearing their two hundred pound suits including a metal helmet,
dove into the darkness of murky Havana harbor. The darkness was so great
that the divers had to use electric lamps, but, even so, they could only
see a foot or so in front of them. Anything they saw, they saw close-up,
something that becomes all the more significant when reading the account
below.

A diver returning from the wreck of the MAINE
is helped up a ladder as Ensign Powelson waits to interview him. In the
foreground men man the diver's air pump. In the background are Spanish
warships.

The Account:

“It was horrible!…As I descended into the death-ship [MAINE’s
wreckage] the dead rose up to meet me. They floated toward me with outstretched
arms, as if to welcome their shipmate. Their faces for the most part were
bloated with decay or burned beyond recognition, but here and there the
light of my lamp flashed upon a stony face I knew, which when I last saw
it had smiled a merry greeting, but now returned my gaze with staring eyes
and fallen jaw. The dead choked the hatchways and blocked my passage from
stateroom to cabin. I had to elbow my way through them, as you do in a
crowd. While I examined twisted iron and broken timbers they brushed against
my helmet and touched my shoulders with rigid hands, as if they sought
to tell me the tale of the disaster. I often had to push them aside to
make my examinations of the interior of the wreck. I felt like a live man
in command of the dead. From every part of the ship came sighs and groans.
I knew it was the gurgling of the water through the shattered beams and
battered sides of the vessel, but it made me shudder; it sounded so much
like echoes of that awful February night of death. The water swayed the
bodies to and fro, and kept them constantly moving with a hideous semblance
of life. Turn which way I would, I was confronted by a corpse.”